Message development, social media strategies, and speaker/media training for individuals and groups, so you don't get caught unprepared, speechless or without a message. I'm Washington, DC-based communications consultant Denise Graveline. Want to pick my brain or get a sense of how I work? Do it here.

Friday, October 07, 2011

Time to untangle all the loose ends of your week, now, and plug into the weekend. I've got plenty of weekend reading for you, based on my finds on Twitter, where I'm @dontgetcaught. Consider yourself wired into my world of resources, starting now:

Is there an app for your community? A Knight Foundation/Federal Communications Commission "Apps for Communities" challenge had more than 50 entrants close to this week's deadline. There's $100,000 in prizes at stake. Read more about the community apps entries here

Video, meet questioners: Here's a mashup of question-and-answer sites and online video: VYou, a video Q-and-A site. You can ask questions of experts and track their new answers, and the startup already has more than a half-million videos loaded. How might you make use of this site for your experts, community relations or practical and advice information?

Search your ancient tweets, finally, with CloudMagic, a Chrome extension that lets you search Google apps as well as Twitter. Being able to search your own tweets is a cumbersome task on Twitter; this fixes it. Check out the introductory video, below:

And a few items I favorited, for later reading:

Let's repeat that again: This Tumblr of unnecessary journalism phrases (think "estimated at about" or "free gift") is useful as a reminder to any writer, or maybe just the laugh you need today. Reminds me of the NBA color commentary I once heard on TV: "You know Fred, to win tonight, Denver has to score more points than the other team." We might need another Tumblr of Obvious Journalism Observations, come to think of it.

Next week, I'll be in Arizona for the ScienceWriters 2011 meeting. Let me know if you'll be there so we can meet up--and thanks again for reading the blog this week.

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